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Publication Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Logging the redwoods: From axes to steam donkeys

By Marion Softky
Almanac Staff Writer

"To be nearby when a big tree comes down is like being in an earthquake," says Ken Fisher of Kings Mountain. "There is a whoosh sound, and then a thump, and then an after-tremor. Then you have absolute quiet, and the absolute quiet is deafening."

Mr. Fisher is leading a group of hikers up Purisima Canyon, west of Kings Mountain, and showing the sites of sawmills that operated from 1854 until as late as 1920. He tells stories of the trees themselves; the people who felled, cut up and moved them; and the advance of technology from water and ox power, to "steam donkeys" that could haul the giant logs with flexible steel cables, and steam-powered mills that sliced them into boards or shingles.

Hikers get firsthand lessons in local archaeology as they pass sites where eight sawmills cut lumber for more than 70 years. From the tangled underbrush above one of the mills run by George Borden and Rufus Hatch in the 1880s, Mr. Fisher pulls out fragments of glass, and a rusty something; he's looking for removable teeth of a circular saw blade. "I've found more than 200 of these," he says, and gestures towards the creek. "There's a smokestack still buried in the sands up there."

"I'm wanting you to see how primitive it was," Mr. Fisher adds. "They're not thinking about decimating the forest. They're thinking about how to cut a tree and make some money."

And cut trees they did. As technology advanced, they went from small trees to big ones. By the time the last mill closed down about 1920, most of the big trees were gone, and the mountains were stripped. With a few exceptions like the Methuselah tree off Skyline Boulevard, which was so knotted that it wasn't worth cutting, today's forest is second growth. Younger trees, which grew from the ever-living roots of old-growth parents, now cover the devastation that old -- and even recent -- logging created.

Mr. Fisher, who may be better known as the founder and CEO of Fisher Investments, and a regular columnist for Forbes Magazine since 1984, has a life-long love affair with the redwoods and their colorful history. Since his childhood in San Mateo, he has roamed the forests, scavenged the sites where historic entrepreneurs felled trees and sawed them up, and become San Mateo County's premier expert on local logging. Sometimes he dons the clothes and persona of George Harkins, one of the hermits who inhabited the hills, and leads a walking tour of Kings Mountain as it was in the 1880s.

Mr. Fisher also brings a business perspective to the evolving industry that chewed up the redwoods to build San Francisco and the cities of the Peninsula. Besides having walked and scrambled across every sawmill site, he talks knowledgeably about markets and business cycles and the economics of lumbering more than a century ago.

"I live in two separate worlds. One is the world I work at, and the other is the world I enjoy," he says in an interview at the luxurious offices of Fisher Investments on Skyline, just north of Purisima Canyon. In a room cluttered with stuffed animals, books, old maps, bottles, and artifacts gathered from the woods, he gestures broadly: "My idea of a good time is this stuff."

Sempervirens: magical redwoods

"Most people don't understand trees," says Mr. Fisher, who studied forestry at Humboldt State College before turning to a career in finance.

Standing in the deep shade of second-growth forest, Mr. Fisher warms to one of his favorite topics: the unique qualities of redwoods.

Thousands of years ago, before the Native Americans came, the old-growth forests that blanketed the Peninsula mountains were not clear of underbrush like Muir Woods or Big Basin today, Mr. Fisher says. They were full of debris dropped from trees that may not have burned for 200 years. "The average old growth tree is 400 to 800 years old," he says.

Later, the Native Americans used fire as a tool; they burned chaparral and grasslands and forests regularly. "San Mateo County forests burned every 25 years," Mr. Fisher says.

But redwoods are resistant to fires; they survive all but the biggest, leaving blackened scars to tell their tales.

"Why doesn't redwood burn?" Mr. Fisher asks rhetorically. It doesn't produce much pitch or resin to burn, and the tannic acid in the wood protects it from rot and insects, he explains. "So it becomes the construction wood of choice."

The Native Americans who preceded the Spanish didn't use the redwood forests much, Mr. Fisher notes. Redwood forests do not support much wildlife, mostly newts and salamanders -- and an occasional grizzly bear.

Redwoods have another magical property: When an old tree dies or is cut down, new trees sprout from its roots. And on and on for generations. "The roots don't die; they are truly sempervirens (ever-living)," says Mr. Fisher. "The redwood is a pretty happy tree."

Thus the ancient trees that have built San Francisco and Peninsula cities have re-grown into the lush redwood forests that still cloak the hills and canyons of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The local industrial revolution

At first people thought the forests were inexhaustible, Mr. Fisher says. People felled the smaller trees with axes and cut them in saw pits where two men sliced them with a single saw.

It was only after the Gold Rush that the demand for lumber soared, and mills sprang up through the mountains; some 35 mill sites have been identified so far from Woodside and Portola Valley as far west and south as Santa Cruz County. Their owners harnessed first water, and then steam, to saw ever-larger logs into boards, which were hauled to the bustling port of Redwood City. At first they were floated to San Francisco using the power of the tides; later schooners took the lumber to build the towns springing up around the Bay.

Most of the lumber taken from the east side of the Peninsula hills went to build San Francisco -- several times. "San Francisco burned regularly. No early building remains from San Francisco," Mr. Fisher says.

As demand grew and technology advanced, lumbering operations moved up and over the hill to the coastal canyons where the trees were bigger. Like Purisima Canyon, where eight mill sites have been identified. Most recently logged in the 1970s, the steep, narrow canyon is now preserved in public ownership as the Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve.

Pointing to a wedge-shaped notch in a mossy stump above the swelling base, Mr. Fisher describes the felling of a giant redwood in Purisima Canyon. Into the notch, the fellers wedged a "springboard," on which they could stand and hack at the tree with axe and saw.

"Two men could take down a big tree in a day -- if they were really good," he says. "These were hard guys; they were used to doing this all day long."

Once the tree was down, it was stripped of branches and bark, and cut into lengths of about 16 feet that oxen could haul to the sawmill. This was done by drilling holes in the big logs, stuffing the holes with dynamite, and literally blowing the logs apart. "Even in 1918 they were blowing trees apart," Mr. Fisher says.

There aren't many artifacts left for hopeful collectors to find, Mr. Fisher notes. Some 25,000 bottles -- mostly liquor -- have already been removed, as well as other portable items such as ox shoes. "The good stuff has all been taken away," he says.

Before the steam donkey engines arrived in the 1880s, loggers relied on teams of oxen to haul the logs to the sawmills over skid roads, made of smaller logs greased to make them slippery.

"Every place they had a mill, they had oxen, and everywhere they had oxen, you find shoes," says Mr. Fisher. In those days, he adds, transportation was more than half the cost of producing lumber.

In technology, the Peninsula logging industry was pretty backward, Mr. Fisher says. "The Silicon Valley of redwood was Humboldt County. New technology filters down from there."

The main exception was one of the area's notable characters, Purdy Pharis, known as the "shingle king." Mr. Fisher led his group past a major mill site where Borden and Hatch had one mill, and Pharis turned out 70,000 shingles a day from another. While the heavy lumber went down the hill to build new cities on the Coastside; the shingles went up and over the hill for wider distribution.

"Pharis was the only innovator," Mr. Fisher says. He invented machines to make and cut shingles, and even tried to build a tramway to lift the shingles to Star Hill Road. That was a failure.

Between 1870 and 1884, Purdy Pharis produced some 3 million shingles, and became the county's largest landowner, with almost 7,000 acres. Then he committed suicide at 56 -- although some still speculate that it was murder.

Crossing a shaded stream, Mr. Fisher says, "A few hundred yards up No Name Creek was a house of ill repute that served the mill people. When I was a kid, there were cabins here."

The lumbermen of that era were tough. They earned a dollar a day, plus food and lodging. "They blew their money readily," Mr. Fisher notes. "Weekends, they headed over the hill to Redwood City to party."

The advent of the steam donkey engine in the 1880s speeded the pace of logging and the devastation it caused. The powerful machines sat on skids and could be moved from tree to tree. They could be rigged by cable to drag logs around corners for a thousand yards. They made oxen obsolete.

Always a boom-or-bust business, local logging petered out toward the end of the 1800s. Alvin Hatch, son of Rufus and a longtime county supervisor into the 1960s, ran a mill in Purisima Canyon from 1906 to 1920. "The last two mills ran for one reason -- World War I," Mr. Fisher says.

When he retires from finance, Mr. Fisher plans to write another book on logging the Peninsula hills and the people who did it. "My fascination is with redwood trees and steam engines, and this is where the two come together."